Tech debt is a thing for any non-trivial product. The more tech debt, the slower it is to create working increments of a product and the more risky changes are.

I have experienced products of which the development has ground to a halt due to the system having such complex interconnections that every change required everyone in every meeting to assess the impact of a change. The root cause was constantly churning out MVPs with no thought of architecture and no overall management of the product or teams. I was the architect hired to clean up the mess.